Federal Court orders Blaney, RCMP to hand over gun registry data

A Federal Court judge has ordered that Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney and the commissioner of the RCMP immediately hand over an external hard drive containing a copy of all Quebec gun registry data.

Judge Luc Martineau gave the government until 10 a.m. Tuesday morning to deliver the hard drive to the court, where it will be sealed until all legal challenges have been resolved over a controversial and retroactive Conservative law dealing with the defunct long-gun registry.

The order followed a day-long hearing in which government lawyers argued it was unnecessary to produce an physical copy of the records because the public safety minister had issued four separate undertakings to preserve the data.

It’s the first legal skirmish in a battle between information commissioner Suzanne Legault and the Harper government over an unprecedented effort to use a budget bill to retroactively rewrite the application and enforcement of the Access to Information Act.

Legault’s lawyer, Richard Dearden, will be back in court Tuesday to launch a constitutional challenge of Bill C-59, the Conservatives’ latest omnibus budget bill, which is set to pass the final vote in the Senate this evening.

Legault says the RCMP broke the law when it destroyed gun registry records in 2012 despite an ongoing investigation and written assurances from the public safety minister that the data would be preserved until the matter was settled.

Yes “the RCMP broke the law when it destroyed gun registry records in 2012
despite an ongoing investigation and written assurances from the public
safety minister that the data would be preserved until the matter was
settled.”

And Steven Blaney is directly and criminally responsible for breaking the law and destroying safety critical public records. For which he can and should be fairly charged as an accomplice to every single gun crime in Quebec…

Blaney has to be one of the most thoroughly unlikeable untrustworthy of men, along with Poilievre and
Clement they all smack of duplicity and cunning. Not nice inspiring traits for Canada’s leaders!
No wonder cheating in three elections was necessary to get these traitors in power. Sad, sad.

I can’t wait “until 10 a.m. Tuesday morning” but who is going to verify that they actually “deliver the hard drive to the court,” with the records actually on it? If “it will be sealed until all legal challenges have been resolved over a controversial and retroactive Conservative law dealing with the defunct long-gun registry”, who looks at it to see if they corrupted or encrypted the data?

Since “the order followed a day-long hearing in which government lawyers argued it was unnecessary to produce an physical copy of the records because the public safety minister had issued four separate undertakings to preserve the data” do we have any written ruling explaining exactly why Steven Blaney and the RCMP and Harper regime are not trusted by the court?

I mean, not that I think they *should* trust them, but, written reasons by a judge not to trust crooks like Harper and Blaney always make good fun reading, especially on leaflets handed to the voters.